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Getting Started

So you want to contribute to the wiki? Great!

But… it's a little daunting. That's okay, I am here to help!

Making an account

The first thing you need to do before you can do anything else is to make an account. In the upper right, there is a link called Register. Please fill out the form, and an email will be sent to you. Follow the instructions in the email, and you can log in to the wiki.

Find a page to edit

The easiest thing to do is to find a page and edit it. This is easier than trying to create new pages and/or navigation. (If you just want a place to play around harmlessly, try playground.)

To do this, just browse the wiki until you find a page that needs some love. On the right side of the page, you'll find four floating icons. The top one is to edit the page you're on. Click that.

This will bring up the editor page. The text of the page you're editing is just plain text with markup. For example, surrounding a word with //two slashes// on either side makes it into italics. The simplest way to learn this markup is to select text and use the edit toolbar above the text area to see what it does. There is also a link called syntax above the toolbar that shows you everything you can do in markup. You are also welcome to click edit on this page to see its markup.

When you're done making your edits, click Preview to see a preview of what the updated page will look like. This will save unwanted revisions from being created in the page's history.

Finally, enter a short description in “Edit summary” to explain what you changed. If it was a minor change, such as trimming spaces, click the “Minor Changes” button. Then click Save.

Congrats! You've made a page edit!

Links

This is important enough to mention in its own little section. You make a link to another page by surrounding it in square brackets, like [[this]]. Spaces inside the link will be converted to underscores automatically, so you can link to getting started rather than getting_started. You can also specify the text to show in the link by putting it after a pipe symbol, like [[getting started|this is great]] (this is great).

Creating new pages

A wiki is a blank canvas waiting to be created. So there are two easy ways to make a new page:

Edit an existing page to create a link to the (currently non-existent) page, then click on that link.

You can then click on the edit button on the right as usual (which has now become a “Create” button), and proceed as normal. I recommend taking option #1 because it will insure that your content is linked in with everything else.

Page names in DokuWiki are typically lower-case with underscores. (So, getting_started, not Getting_Started or GettingStarted.)

Oops!

You made a change and didn't mean to do that, oops! Don't worry, the history is all there. Choose the second icon on the right, “Old revisions”. You can see the older versions and even see the differences in each one highlighted.

Accidentally deleting a page is a little harder to recover from, but not impossible. I'm going to leave off how to delete a page in this intro article, because it's honestly probably something you shouldn't do at first.